Social Media and SEO – The New Gold Rush

The landscape of SEO is changing and, well, you’re probably not ready to react. Many organizations are just getting up to speed with in-page optimization strategies. Those are all the things you do on a web-page for SEO, like focusing on a specific keyword with title tags, a good description and other fun details too geeky to get into right now. Some forward-thinking companies are exploring off-page strategies which involve building links to and from valuable web properties. And now, main-stream marketers are discovering something previously only exploited by hot-shot Internet Marketers: Social Media Strategies for linking are an SEO gold mine.

Yes, I know, you’re tired of hearing the S-word – it’s everywhere.  The S-word is ubiquitous and almost annoyingly showing up in every media source you encounter from blogs to TV news stories. Even the line-cook at Denny’s is talking about it – heck, he moon-lights as a social marketer. Haven’t you heard? EVERYONE’S promoting their personal brand in social media these days.

Whether you think times are ripe for a social backlash or not, social media spaces are only becoming more and more important to any online marketing and recruitment strategy. Let me tell you why social media is the next big thing for SEO.

You see, first of all search engines are very clique-conscious. The more popular and authoritative a site is, the more reputation it has to share. When one of those sites links to another site it passes a bit of credibility to the new site, making the search engines say: “Hey, if Amazon links to that site it MUST be worthwhile. I’m going to give it a better search results ranking.” In SEO this is called sharing ‘link juice.’

How powerful is link juice? Let’s just say that 1 link from a site with a lot of link juice can do more for your search engine results position than 20 links from sites with no link juice.

Who’s got the juice?

Right now, social media sites have a LOT of link juice. Google, for instance, isn’t stupid. They know that a lot of people are busy sharing information on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and other social media sites. These are real people sharing information they find valuable in real time. If you’re a search engine, it’s like being able to tap into the internet’s stream of consciousness and find out what site’s people really think are the most valuable about any given topic.

Google already gives certain social media sites extra exposure and the links from these sites carry the juice to prove it. In real-time news search, you can already watch topic-related tweets and Facebook status updates emerge among blog and news story updates on Google. Just click on the ‘options’ link on your Google search results and then click the ‘Latest’ link to let Google know you want the ‘latest news results.’

How to get social link juice

Taking advantage of the new social-search phenomena isn’t as easy as just setting up a Twitter account or a Facebook page and linking to your career website or job listings. Nobody ever said anything worthwhile is easy. Your destination pages have to be optimized; your social sources need to be diverse and populated with worthwhile, interesting content; your use of keywords has to be selective but not spammy.

Really, the first steps to getting good social link juice are recommended best practices in their own right:

1)      Develop good content on your career website

2)      Build branded social media presences that provide interesting information to your candidate audience. (FYI: ‘Interesting information’ doesn’t mean job listings or blatant self-promotion.)

As attendees of the NAS Social Networking Boot Camp learn in our hands-on sessions, developing a effective social presence means you become an asset to your audience by giving them information and tools that help meet their goals – not necessarily yours. This alone transforms you from a suspect source of self-serving advertising into a valuable resource. And that’s an important key to building an audience…and ultimately a stream of link juice you can direct through your branded social media properties.